As the internet and technology have developed in the last few years, The majority of people are leaning towards online stores to buy routine items and other expensive items also.

When people buy anything online this process is known as e-commerce. In the starting stages of e-commerce, there were not many competitors in the market. But if you try to start a new website for your business and especially e-commerce store now, It might be a bit difficult for you. So you should have all the in and outs of e commerce cms.

However, there are many people still making lots of money by creating this type of online store and Drop-Shipping products all around the world. The industry of e-commerce is growing like crazy in recent years.

Now if you want to make your own e-commerce store then you can either go for Shopify or woocommerce. which are considered as the best performing platforms for everyone.

Which one to choose from Shopify & Woocommerce?

Both have their own advantages and disadvantages. The main point is that you’ll have to choose the right one according to your requirements. So which is the right one for you? Let’s find out!

Shopify

As the first choice for building an E-commerce store, we are going to explore Shopify. Shopify is a Canadian E-commerce multinational company with headquarters situated in Ottawa, Canada.

It was started in 2004 and empowering lots of entrepreneurs running an E-commerce business. By providing these services Shopify generates approx 107 crores per year as their revenue.

You can either create an E-commerce store to sell your own products by using their services or Dropship someone’s products. They provide a variety of services to everyone in this field which is listed below.

Features:

• E-commerce Hosting
• Website editor
• Domain Names
• Themes
• Mobile Commerce
• E-commerce Software
• Online Store Builder

With these amazing features, you won’t be disappointed by Shopify for sure. They even have an affiliate program by which you can generate some extra income to support your new business also.

But the main difference between Shopify and Woocomerce is that woo-commerce is an open-source and free plugin that can be used for building e-commerce stores while Shopify is paid.

Pricing:

When working with Shopify you get 14 days free trial to test things out. You can check almost all the services you want and decide whether you want to use their service or not. You can choose from any of the following plans which suit you the best.

1.  Basic Shopify

If you are just a beginner in the E-commerce business then this plan can be the best choice for you. Because in the basic plan of Shopify you get all the required features you need to start a successful e-commerce store.

2. Shopify

After you have set your store properly then you can upgrade your plan to this one. In this plan, you’ll get more advanced features compared to basic Shopify plans. So it’s always a good choice to support your growing business with enough resources.

3. Advanced Shopify

In the Advanced Shopify plan, you can do almost every type of customization in your store. Because you will get lots of new features like advanced report builder, Third-party calculated shipping rates, etc.

So these are the features and pricing available in Shopify if you think that it would be a good choice for your business then go for it. Now let’s explore our second option Woocommerce.

WooCommerce

As stated earlier the main difference between Shopify and Woocommerce is that Shopify charges you for using their service. While if you want to use Woocommerce for creating an online store then it’s completely free.

Woocommerce is a plugin that can be easily installed in your Wordpress business website or self-hosted WordPress blog and turn it into an E-commerce store. The main benefit of using woocommerce is that its open-source program which means you can customize and edit everything as you wish.

You can literally sell anything you want from physical products, digital downloads, subscriptions, content, and even appointments. And unlike Shopify where you can only add limited staff accounts, you can create unlimited staff accounts in woocommerce.

So basically you can go for woocommerce without any doubt because of all these amazing features and management capabilities which are as below.

Features:

• Open Source And Free To Use
• Easy to use interface
• Provides Easy management of unlimited products
• Supports most payment gateways like Stripe, Amazon Payments, Payfast, PayPal, etc.
• Provides a nice and clean Storefront theme to integrate everything
• Custom Geo-location based tax calculations
• Provides intuitive and WP-centric UI for easy stock management.
• Frequent updates for best possible security
• You control all of your data through WordPress
• It provides lots of paid and free extensions for more functionality.

The woocommerce offers various types of free and paid extensions to add additional features to your e-commerce store. You can easily integrate everything by using these extensions. But not all the extensions are available for free use. Some of them are paid ones which can be used according to your requirements.

If you are someone who is just starting out in this field then woo-commerce is not that beginner-friendly and doesn’t include some of the important core features within the system. Free sounds great but it doesn’t mean you will get everything in it. When installing the woocommerce you’ll need to choose a good hosting for your store.

Woocommerce isn’t easy to use for inexperienced users because with every new hosting provider the process to get customer support for your various problems will be different. For example, if you run into any problem the only option you have is a community forum.

In spite of being free to use Woocommerce provides a high power core system but you need the proper knowledge to handle that power also.

Conclusion:

Shopify and Woocommerce both are one of the best platforms to start your online store. But each of them has its own pros and cons. If you are serious about your business and want to easily set up your store then I would suggest going for Shopify. Because it comes with great customer support service and you don’t have to be tech-savvy.

While if you want to start your store with minimal investment then you can go for woocommerce. But you can run into major problems without a proper support system. You’ll have to learn everything by yourself and make your way through it on your own.

You can always use the youtube tutorials for certain problems related to woocommerce. So the choice is yours to make whether you want a quick and easy support system with a small investment or the same system for free with a poor support system.